Nine more students among Yalies to study at Oxford, Cambridge next year

Nine Yale seniors have been awarded fellowships from a variety of organizations for graduate study at Oxford and Cambridge universities. These are in addition to students, previously announced in YaleNews, who have won prestigious Rhodes and Gates-Cambridge Scholarships.

Bradford Case

Bradford Case, who is majoring in the humanities, will pursue an M.Phil. in classics at Cambridge University with the support of a Paul Mellon Fellowship. He is interested in the intersection of the Greco-Roman classics and politics in modern literature. His humanities thesis examines the political role of the classics in 20th-century Ireland through the works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and W.B. Yeats. As the Goodyear Intern in Ancient Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, Case has developed new ways of teaching ancient art through its reception history in Yale’s collections and has led research on ancient Egyptian painting and sculpture.

Case is also the co-music director of Berkeley College Orchestra and a bassoonist in several campus ensembles. At Cambridge, he will explore the points of contact between postcolonial Ireland and the Greek-speaking world under the Roman Empire. He also hopes to play bassoon in the Clare College Music Society.

Ariq Hatibie 

Ariq Hatibie has received the Clarendon Scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. in global governance and diplomacy at Oxford, where he hopes to explore comparative approaches by regional institutions to international law.

An international student from Hong Kong and Indonesia, Hatibie is majoring in global affairs at Yale. His final project investigated reconciliation for the Yazidis of Northern Iraq following the 2014 genocide by ISIS, for which he received the department’s Capstone Prize. He has worked on investor-state arbitration policy for the European Union’s financial stability department, and on trade policy at the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. On campus, Hatibie has been involved with the Alliance for Southeast Asian Students and the Chaplain’s Office, and has written for the Yale Globalist. He hopes to help reshape international institutions towards safeguarding human rights in an age of increasing fragmentation.

Kelsea Jeon

Kelsea Jeon has been awarded the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to pursue an M.Phil. in social-legal research at Oxford University. She is a history major who wrote her thesis on the origins of modern-day understandings of access to justice in America.

Jeon’s interest in access to justice has stemmed from her experiences as an intern in civil courts in Los Angeles and New York City. At Oxford, she will focus on the role of non-lawyers in increasing access to justice for unrepresented litigants. At Yale, Jeon is a member of the Yale Mock Trial Association, the Yale Roosevelt Institute, and Kappa Kappa Gamma. 

Charlie Lee

Charlie Lee majored in English and has been awarded the Sidney Ehrman Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in modern and contemporary literature at Cambridge. He wrote his senior thesis on narratives of postcolonial Irish identity in the “Circe” episode of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At Cambridge, he hopes to build on this work, focusing particularly on the reception of classical texts in Irish and Caribbean literature. He plans eventually to pursue a Ph.D. in English. 

At Yale, Lee was a student in the writing concentration. As a second senior thesis, he wrote a collection of short stories. Last summer, he worked as a Liman Fellow at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a public interest law office in New Orleans specializing in capital defense. He has worked as a tutor and mentor for refugee children in New Haven with Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services and as an editorial assistant at the Yale Review. He has also been a member of Red Hot Poker, a sketch comedy group.

Elizabeth Olatunji

Elizabeth Olatunji is majoring in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale, and will pursue her M.Phil. in public health at the University of Cambridge with the support of the Paul Mellon Fellowship.

Olatunji is interested in health disparities rooted in class and racial struggle, and the potential of public policy to improve the health of disadvantaged populations. She has served as a research intern at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Kisumu, Kenya, where she performed detection and susceptibility tests of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in patient samples. At Yale, she conducted research on the discovery and characterization of novel small and alternative open reading frames. Olatunji has also served as the coordinator for the Jones-Zimmermann Academic Mentoring Program at Celentano School; director of education for Yale Medical Brigades; an instructor and mentor for the Yale Young African Scholars Program; and a patient-assist volunteer with Yale Undergraduates at Connecticut Hospice.

Shady Qubaty

Shady M. Qubaty, who is majoring in both economics and Near Eastern studies, has received the Henry Fellowship, Cambridge Trust Award and King’s College Scholarship to earn his M.Phil. in development studies at King’s College, Cambridge University. He hopes to focus his research on post-war economic recovery in Yemen and methods of restructuring the League of Arab States and Gulf Cooperation Council.

Qubaty is the first-ever Yemeni undergraduate to be admitted to Yale. He is the co-founder of Yemen's leading international NGO Adalah, which has been appointed as the official secretariat to the U.K. Parliament, and serves as the vice president of the Economic Forum for Sustainable Development. He participated in United Nations Human Rights Council meetings in Geneva, spoke before and moderated panels at the U.K. Parliament, and was the only Yemeni and youngest panelist invited to the Beirut Institute Summits in Abu Dhabi. At Yale, he has been a competitive table tennis player and leader of the team and is president of the Arab Students Association, Morse College Council, and MENA Students Association, which he founded to lead the campaign to establish a fifth cultural center for the Middle East and North Africa. A teaching fellow and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Qubaty is a leader of the Yale Alumni Fund’s Senior Class Gift, an assistant to the MacMillan Center's Council on Middle East Studies, and in 2018 directed Yale's first Arab conference “Amalna — Paving the Road Ahead.” He was also awarded the Clarendon Scholarship at Oxford University but opted to pursue his studies at Cambridge.

Helen Rouner

With a Paul Mellon Fellowship, Helen Rouner will pursue an M.Phil. in English at Cambridge University, where she will study 18th-century and Romantic poetry.

Rouner has been interning for publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux since her graduation from Yale this past December. During her time as an undergraduate in Davenport College, Rouner served as a visual arts beat reporter for the Yale Daily News, musical director of the all-women's a cappella group Something Extra, and a member of the Yale Glee Club. Her senior thesis in the English major analyzed the aesthetic and conceptual functions of limit in the prophetic poetry of William Blake. She hopes to focus her research at Cambridge on the intersection of the poetic and the political at the turn of the 19th century.

Eliot Setzer

Elliot Setzer has been awarded the inaugural King’s-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in political thought and intellectual history at Cambridge University. At Yale, he served as president of the Yale Political Union and editor-in-chief of Brink: A Review of Books. He was also a student fellow at the Information Society Project. His senior thesis on democratic citizenship and political economy in 19th-century French liberal thought won the Philo Sherman Bennett prize for the best senior essay in political philosophy. Before coming to Yale, Setzer attended Deep Springs College.

Jackson Willis

Jackson S. Willis of Berkeley College focused his academic work at Yale on creedal democracy, development economics, and the intersection of law and humanities. He has been awarded a full fellowship through Rotary International to study economics at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, and will attend Yale Law School in fall 2021.

At Yale, Willis participated in Directed Studies and the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. He is primarily engaged as chair and volunteer for the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project and serves on the Dwight Hall board of directors. He is also a student curator and gallery guide at the Yale Center for British Art. Willis has previously worked for Ramsar as a Robin Berlin Fellow, at the Yale Investments Office, with the Dalí Museum on a U.S.-Cuba art exchange, and as a professional muralist for his hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida. Before senior year, he joined the Peace Corps Response working to decrease youth unemployment in Guinea. There, his team operated the country’s leading small business accelerator, testing the limits of social franchising for employment gain.